The Null Device

Re: the Deja/Google thing: I recently read on a mailing list a credible argument stating that there are no surviving USENET archives going back before 1995. Namely, those which existed were sent by their keepers (on VAX tapes and such) to DejaNews, who promised to put them online. Then Deja was seized by the barbarians who turned it into a naff shopping portal, making it hard to access news properly and so on, and causing it to go down the toilet; the old VAX tapes disappeared (possibly junked or burned as heating fuel or something), and are unlikely to have survived the dot-com boom. Which is saddening or blackly amusing, depending on how you look at it.

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